The Malignant Dead

Sunken Treasures

Dark Gathering

Wow, it’s been a while since our last post. We’ve been quite busy so haven’t had a lot of time to blog, as we’ve been catching up on other stuff. Since we last blogged, we’ve done two ghost hunts – at RAF Rivenhall in Essex and the Savoy Theatre in Monmouth – and we’ve been selling our books at different horror cons – Bristol in October and Wales Comic Con at the start of November.

us and the gorgeous Tom Wlaschiha

We got to meet one of our childhood favourites, Mr Motivator, and attempted to flirt with Tom Wlaschiha, who played Jaqen H’Ghar in Game of Thrones. We say ‘attempted’ because we may have given him a backhanded compliment. He told us we were going on his list. Considering he plays an assassin, this may not be a great list to be on. But as we say to our best mate, Neen, the day we stop embarrassing ourselves, the Fates will grow bored of us and cut our mortal coils. Our next con is Whitby Comic Con on 19th November. We’re staying in a youth hostel on Whitby Abbey grounds, so naturally we’ll be spending our night ghost hunting and looking for Dracula. We’ve also been commissioned to write short stories for a few anthologies, so they’ve been keeping us out of mischief.

But we have some good news. Our poem, Banquet of the Damned, was published in Swansea and District Writers Circle’s horror anthology, Dark Gathering. We wrote the poem back in 2009 and it’s about the damned and demons celebrating the end of days with a lavish feast of human flesh. We don’t often submit poetry – mostly because our rebellious natures don’t respond well to all those rules and restrictions. Plus we can never remember what the rules are.

Also, our short story, Death’s Cold Kiss was shortlisted in To Hull and Back‘s humorous story competition and published in the anthology. We wrote this story in 2007 – it was one of the first short stories we wrote and has always been one of our favourites. It’s set in the waiting room of the afterlife. The main character believes she’s being stalked by the man of her dreams, but he’s actually a grim reaper. And definitely not Mr Right. This would probably happen to us.

But wait, there’s more. We know, usually, as our mate, Andrew said, if we didn’t have bad luck, we’d have no luck at all. And we didn’t even have to sacrifice someone to ancient god to make this happen. Bit gutted about that. We’d bought the robes and everything. But our story, The Eden Project, won third place in the British Fantasy Society Award. The judge loved it and said it takes the knife to celebrity culture and society’s obsession with beauty in a witty way. It’s set in a futuristic world where natural beauty has diminished so retreats were set up to breed beautiful people, who then earn their keep by being film stars and models. The story follows twins Leah and Shania, who tour the human safari park and learn that beauty has an ugly truth. It was written in 2009 but has had several rewrites since then, including a new ending. We actually gave up on it for a couple of years, but needed a story for a competition, so worked on it, improved it, and submitted it. After a couple more rejections, it’s finally found a home and will be published in the BFS journal. We cannot wait.

And our short story, Penitence Ball, was accepted in an anthology, Welcome to the Dance, but we don’t have a release date yet. Again, it was written in 2009 and was inspired by My Chemical Romance’s ‘To the End’ where they mention a penitence ball. We originally wrote a poem, based on what we thought a penitence ball would be like, then turned that poem into a story. Every Halloween, those who died with regret, rise from the dead to dance at the penitence ball. If they accept what brought them there, they can leave the dance. If they can’t, they must return every year until they do.

Clearly, 2009 was a good year for ideas, but our writing wasn’t up to standard for them to be published. Perhaps in 7 years, the stories we wrote this year will be published.

Cat doing the geisha

And in completely unrelated news, two months ago, we started doing PoleFit at KT Wild’s Vertical Fitness and we absolutely love it. We thought we’d be shit at it but we’re not too bad. Except for yesterday’s lesson, when Lynx was upside on the pole, fell and landed on her shoulders and head. Considering how much we fall over on Calamityville, we’re surprised we haven’t fallen off before. So if this writing malarky fails, at we now have a Plan B…